Spaceflight in an Internet Age

date_range
16 July 2015

Rambling

Science

A thought popped through my head this morning; “What year was it that we last had a first encounter with a planet?”. The answer is 1989 when Voyager 2 visited Neptune and we finally had some high resolution images of the other blue planet to drool over.

It’s crazy to think as well that we have Hubble for instance that can take vivid pictures of galaxies that are so far away, we are seeing them how they were when the Romans were in charge (and those are still pretty close), but the best image we could get of Pluto was a 10-15 pixel resolution blur. To think we didn’t know Pluto sported it’s beautiful heart shaped feature and seriously puts into perspective how small planets are…

When New Horizons left Earth, Twitter was still in it’s infancy, and Nasa certainty wouldn’t have had plans to be sharing the first images from it’s spacecraft on it. It’s just as crazy to think that in the time it currently takes us to get to the edge of our own solar system, our whole social dynamic can change.

We now have astronauts producing YouTube videos, and landers on comets anthropomorphised on Twitter.

I’d just like to thank the people who take the time out of their busy schedules making sure spacecraft don’t collide with moons 3 billion miles away to share pictures like these with us